Managing intellectual property can be a time-consuming process, especially for major enterprises with thousands of inventions, patents, and trademarks. That’s why companies like Microsoft, Ford, and Coca-Cola turn to Anaqua for help.

GuestWhen launching a startup, legal issues often get brushed aside in order for founders to focus on building the product. But making the wrong legal decision early on in the process of starting your company may lead to thorny problems in the future.

It’s time to examine the idea of “intellectual property” a little more clearly, especially when patent law dominates business headlines and the outcome of the Apple-Samsung trial holds enormous implications for the tech industry.

GuestWhen you’re neck deep in starting a new business, you may not take the time to properly protect your inventions. Here are five easy tips on how to quickly develop an intellectual property strategy.

At a time when technology companies are spending large sums of money battling it out over patents, a new technology promises to let you know your chances of winning a patent suit before you even start.

We now know that patent trolling costs the US economy $30 billion a year, give or take. And patents can effectively be used to stifle competition. What’s an embattled CEO to do when the patent trolls come calling?

After putting the end to Apple’s epic court case against Motorola Mobility, renowned federal appeals court judge Richard Posner is now wondering whether patents for software (and some other industries) should even exist.

Facebook is learning that money and fame cannot buy you everything. The social network has been thwarted in its aggressive pursuit to sue any company that uses “book” or “face” in its domain name, most recently against a porn site in Norway.

While Americans were busy fighting the SOPA and PIPA bills at home, nations around the globe, including the United States, were signing on to ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which many in the world of technology feel is as bad or worse than the home grown piracy legislation.

As the third most popular source of content on digital pin-board site Pinterest, Flickr and its photographers are subject to frequent acts of copyright infringement. But a site-wide update to Flickr promises to better protect members and their copyrighted works.

By way of the “pin,” accidental thieves have exchanged copyrighted content on digital pin-board site Pinterest. To thwart any lawsuits in the making, the much talked-about startup is giving disgruntled site-owners a way to stop piracy before it starts by blocking their images from showing up on Pinterest.

A five year-old legal battle between Viacom and Google-owned YouTube over copyrighted content continues to clog up the U.S. court system because Viacom, parent company of Paramount Pictures and MTV, believes there’s an important principle at stake, president and CEO Philippe Dauman said Tuesday.

Curebit, the Y Combinator friend-referral startup that got busted over the weekend for stealing code and design work from web megashop 37signals, has been caught stealing again, this time from an independent musician.

Proving that one man’s trash is another’s treasure, New York-based incubator Ingk Labs has salvaged an e-commerce patent gem from a defunct startup. It hopes to use that second-hand technology to corner the online-bartering market and take on eBay and Amazon.

Device maker Samsung says an Australian judge who banned the sale of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 in that country does not know the basic facts of the case, and her reasoning is “grossly unjust.” Lawyers for Samsung are appealing a temporary injunction that has frozen the company out of the market due to claims that Samsung “slavishly copied” the iPad when creating its own tablet, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.

A reader asks: My co-founders and I are working on a cool new site, and we’ll be ready to launch in a few weeks. I’ve been reading a lot on the web about incorporation and other legal stuff. We have no money, so we’re going to do the legal ourselves. Assuming we might mess something up, are there any mistakes that can’t be fixed down the road? We know that once we get money in we can clean things up, but we’re worried about mistakes that just can’t be fixed. (And please don’t tell us to hire a lawyer.)

A patent dispute is unfolding between Kodak and photo-sharing site Shutterfly that could have ramifications for some of the broader photo-sharing sites on the web, such as Yahoo’s Flickr, the widely-used Picasa by Google, and Facebook’s Photos feature.

While Facebook Places wasn’t the first on the location-based services scene, it may have just became the top dog. According to Eric Sherman at CBS’s BNET site, the company has been granted a very broad patent, filed in 2007, called “Systems and methods for automatically locating Web-based social network members.”

Larry, Sergey, Eric: Matt Marshall and I are putting you on notice. This “Google Beat” thing is going too far. VentureBeat is mad as hell, and we’re not taking it anymore. This is our official notice to the triumvirate ruling Google that the gloves are off.